33. Morgan in Townsend, Art of Bill Viola, 104. I lean here on Morgan’s vivid description.
34. Interview August 19, 2013.
35. Ross, Bill Viola, 144.
36. Bulhof and ten Kate, Flight of the Gods, 4–5. See also William Franke’s two-volume edited study, On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts.
37. Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 2.
38. Bulhof and ten Kate, Flight of the Gods, 5.
39. Turner, Darkness of God, 34.
40. See also in this context Davies and Turner, Silence and the Word.
41. Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, 244.
42. Turner, “Art of Unknowing,” 473.
43. Norris, Deconstruction, 28–29.
44. Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Collected Works, passim.
45. Reinhardt, St. John of the Cross, 1–3.
46. Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 32.
47. Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 368–70 passim.
48. In Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Collected Works, 53–54.
49. Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 365.
50. Ibid.
51. Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Collected Works, 89.
52. Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 17.
53. Bulhof and ten Kate, Flight of the Gods, 6.
54. Townsend, Art of Bill Viola, 131.
55. Ibid., 105.
56. Ibid.
57. Plato, Timeaus, in Eco, Art and Beauty, 17.
58. Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 16–17.
59 Rolt, Dionysius the Areopagite, 95–96.
60. Dionysius, in Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 163.
61. Ibid., 171.
62. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1:6.
63. Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 1.
64. Dionysius, in ibid., 160.
65. Dionysius, in ibid., 179–80.
66. Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Complete Works, 268–69.
67. Rochelle, “Apophatic Preaching,” 411.
68. Davies and Turner, Silence and the Word, 18.
69. Ibid., 23.
70. Turner, Darkness of God, 21.
71. Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Complete Works, 462.
72. Garcia-Rivera, “On a New List of Aesthetic Categories,” 170.
73. Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Complete Works, 626.
74. Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 333.
75. See Turner, Darkness of God, chapter 8.
76. Taylor, “Cloud Texts,” 145.
77. Berry and Wernick, Shadow of Spirit, 250.
78. Maika J. Will draws a distinction in the agency of grace—God or man—between the Pseudo-Dionysius and the Cloud author: “the Areopagite suggests that the soul is given the grace to raise itself up to the transcendent God, while the Cloud author maintains instead that the transcendent God descends into the soul to work there directly through operant grace” (Will, “Dionysian Neoplatonism,” 189; see also part two of this study, in the June 1992 issue).
79. Griffin, Cloud of Unknowing, 10–11, 17.
80. Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 336.
81. The term “primordial knowing” is used by Larry Cooley in his article “Way to Ultimate Meaning.”
82. Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 27.
83. Eckhart in Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 295–97.
84. Viola speaks about reading Eckhart’s sermons during his own self-isolating retreats to read and write. See Ross, Bill Viola, 145.
85. Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 28.
86. Ibid., 286.
87. Ibid., 287–88.
88. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 3.
89. Turner draws a greater distinction between the two mystics in his Darkness of God (chapter 7); there he also makes the point that the Cloud author is much more critical of the spatial metaphors of this descriptive language (“above,” “below,” “within,” “without”); see 204–5.
90. See Colledge and McGinn, Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons.
91. Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis has written eloquently about these East-West connections for Viola in her essay “Something Rich and Strange: Bill Viola’s Uses of Asian Spirituality,” in Townsend, Art of Bill Viola, 161–79.
92. Ibid., 162. Interestingly, Viola’s Room for St. John of the Cross was recently reassembled and on view in the exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia. It is also important to note cross-cultural approaches to apophatic traditions, such as Williams, Denying Divinity, and Scharfstein, Ineffability.
93. Turner, “Art of Unknowing,” 484.
94. On the use of the term “transcendental signified,” see Pokorn, “Language and Discourse of the Cloud of Unknowing,” 408–21.
3 In Excess
Towards a Theological Sublime
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;it is too high, I cannot attain to it.
—Psalm 139:6
Sublimity, a concept first presented in an aesthetic treatise attributed to the first-century Greek rhetorician, literary scholar and philosopher Longinus, is, in short, about the power of descriptive failure, about the defeat of expressible thought or articulable sensation, and the inherent richness in that inability to apprehend; the sublime, in other words, as a disruptive force marks the limits of reason with an intimation of what might lie beyond those limits.95 This is the paradox of the sublime, mindfulness of an unbridgeable gap between the world of sensuous reality and the realm of the supersensible—made available to reason by that very failure of reason. As Slavoj Žižek explains:
This is also why an object evoking in us the feeling of Sublimity gives us simultaneously pleasure and displeasure: it gives us displeasure because of its inadequacy to the Thing-Idea [the supersensible Idea], but precisely through this inadequacy it gives us pleasure by indicating the true, incomparable greatness of the Thing, surpassing every possible phenomenal, empirical experience.96
Architects of the Sublime
For Immanuel Kant, arch-theorist of the Enlightenment, the sublime—centerpiece to his Critique of Judgement (1790)—describes that experience which reveals to the mind Nature’s power to suggest to the imagination, to intimate and embody, what is visually unrepresentable. In the presence of the sublime—denoted, as Kant had it, by vast and powerful objects and overwhelming spaces—we are reminded that Nature as boundless manifold is not ours to know completely; the imagination cannot grasp it in a single clarifying image, nor can understanding deal with it—a defect of or affront to human faculties unacceptable under an a priori law of reason which demands wholeness of comprehension.